Dancing With God

When I was a boy, my uncle used to take my cousin and me camping in the Adirondack Mountains. There was a large lake we used to camp beside called Lake Pharaoh because the mountain that bordered it looked like the sarcophagus of a pharaoh. My uncle told us that the lake was bottomless, that no one had ever found the bottom of it. This idea frightened and fascinated me at the same time. As I placed my fishing pole over the side of the boat and watched my sinker take the hook down and down my mind would travel down with it into the invisible dark depths of the water. I remember simultaneously feeling fear and the excitement of mystery.

T’ai Chi Chih is a mysterious practice. I would guess that most people don’t stay with it long enough to experience its depth. Maybe it’s too scary. It, too, is a bottomless lake. It takes me down ever deeper into the murky depths beneath the surface of my body, beneath the ripples of my emotions, beneath the thoughts of my mind. Beneath the … I don’t know what. There are no words. It takes me beneath air, beneath light, beneath my sense of me. Softer, softer …beneath softness.

It is fearful and exciting. As I continue my practice, I find bits of thoughts coming up like bubbles from the depths of Lake Pharaoh: “If I let go too much, will I die? Will I disappear? Will I be able to resurface? Will they know where to find me? No, they don’t know how to get here; they don’t know where this is.”

Then there is this strange happening. Someone or something else is here with me. It is dancing with me. It is a being that can breathe under water, live in the murky depths and still see. It has its own light. I find I am dancing with it. It is mirroring my “taffy” movements, passing clouds with me; it is like dancing with God. As I emerge it stays down. We gently part. I surface, still alive, still breathing. I sit for a meditation period amazed, not only at the experience, but that there are not lines of people waiting to learn these movements, to delve into the mystery beneath their being. To experience what I have come to call, Dancing with God.